Hello all,
If you are planning to install Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers, I have a few unimportant notes to share with you. If you have already installed the IE 8 Beta 1, you can also comment on my blog post here on Kodyaz on the topics I'll be writing about now.
First of all, Internet Explorer 8 still crashes. But as I note on an other post on this blog, IE8 has some features to return back to its stable state. So this is a very nice feature.
Also if you have to close the IE 8 Beta 1 web browser from an unusual way, such as using the task manager, etc on a problem when you re-open this new web browser, IE 8 Beta 1 asks you if you wish to recover the web requests that was on the browser instance during that time. This feature is also a very good enhancement.
Again to note on new enhancements of Internet Explorer 8, crash recovery features is very useful for a web browser. That is the pros of IE8.
I have finished reading the Technology Overview documentation of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers, and I get pleased with the "Connection Events" of IE 8 web browser. Now you can define what a browser is expected to do when it returns from online to offline or from offline to online. And you can handle it with just a few lines of code as an attribute on the
body tag of the web page html source code.
"Data URI Support" is also something I liked to see in the new web browser IE8 Beta 1. This feature, Data URIs will enable web developers like me :) to embed files or resources like images, CSS files, javascript files, etc on a web page. This will make a web page request response as a single download to the client.
Working with the cookies will be easier now with Internet Explorer 8. Instead of a 50 key/value pair store limitation in cookies now with the enhancements in IE8 a domain has the ability to store 10MBs of data.
Domain highlighting is a a simple but yet good feature in order to inform the users about where or which site they are surfing on. This will be a warning for web users to be more carefull while navigating on the internet.
One more topic as todays pros list is the Activities in the Internet Explorer. Actually Activities are web service applications that posts or sends the highlighted text area on the web page content and processes that data like places the address on a map, or translates a word into an other language, etc. By the way, for whom interested to create an activity in the Internet Explorer 8 web browser, there is a guide for developers describing how to create activities using an XML based configuration.
Below you can see two pictures of activities, one is menu activated and displayed with default activity list.
One point which I can not find the reason yet is that sometimes the green Activity selector arrow is not displayed. I do not know if there is a bug within IE8, or property on the page prohobits the selector to be displayed successfully.
There are more points to deal with as positive changes in the Internet Explorer with the new beta version Beta 1.
I want to say a few points I would like they were also handled with previous success. One of the points is using the Ctrl+F to make search on the web site content. In previous versions, IE7 warns the user if there is not any text or string that is being looked for in the page files content. In the new beta IE 8 Beta 1, if the browser fails to find an instance of the search string, there is no warning or an extra message to the users. This behaviour causes me as a web user to think that did I fail to see the highlighted string on the page. Perhaps this change in the informing the user that no match is found on the page is configured to display a not found message. But I could not find such a settings in the Advanced Settings tab, or somewhere else.
Second simple point is that I have a long list of favorites links on my Favorites - Links folder. When I display them on the toolbar, and have a long list of web addresses in the folder, I can not navigate up or down in the folder contents using the up and down arrows. I had to use the mouse. Below is a screenshot illustrating the point.
I want my mobility on this long list of favorites folder on the toolbar using the up and down keys.
I will be working on the Developer Tools enhancements on the IE8 soon and planning to post a blog on this subject soon. By then may the force be with you :)